Love in the Time of Coronavirus
Photo by Julian Wan on Unsplash
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If there is one thing Christians are to be known for, certainly it is their God-given ability to love. “God is love,” John tells us, addressing us as “Beloved,” revealing our truest identity as those who have been loved by God (1 John 4:7-8). John takes this further, in the same passage, showing us clearly what love is and what it looks like by saying that “the love of God was made manifest among us” in God sending “his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” “In this is love,” John continues, “not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
There is no question about what love is—John has been very clear to us that love is what God did for us in his Son. There is no greater love than this right? All who are in Christ, who have been saved through his love, can surely attest to this.
Yet, John does not leave us here, but continues with an argument that is crucial for us to hear. He makes a case, and this case is infallible and inerrant because it is the word of God. It is a logical case, something a philosopher could theorize, or a lawyer in a court room, or even a scientist: If A is true, surely, B must follow. And the argument is this: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
Do we still believe in love?
In a secular age, as Charles Taylor has called it, where the process of secularization is occurring without reverse and we, as secular people whether we like the title or not, are growingly disenchanted and left finally to only ourselves, we are faced with a timeless question. And, as the saying goes, anyone who asks a question is really asking about love, right? And I am. I am asking about love. I want to know if we still believe in it.
I think many, Christian or not, are asking the same question. We are very disenchanted, we secularized people. Can we risk believing in a God who loves us when we are not sure if love is something more than an increase of dopamine in the brain, an evolutionary reaction developed only to save us from dying out like the other plants and animals.
How can we know what love is?
And if we can believe in love, the shrinking yet still enchanted part of the heart manages to ask (be it by heart-disease, major depressive disorder, a personality disorder, the heart is still asking), how can we know what it is? How can we know what love really looks like? The human heart looks, quietly, sometimes messily, for the answer that we as Christians know and can give.
Coronavirus came last spring and so my illustration reveals itself more narrowly. Most of us experienced lockdowns. We were alone to ourselves, physically, some of us with family, some of us with no one else, unless we are counting Siri.
“Siri? What is love?” I, perhaps you, or your neighbor, ask to a black, blank screen that mirrors one’s own reflection.
“As I understand it,” Siri replies to a room comprised of white, empty walls, “Love refers to a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude.” Her definition leaves me in the dark.
What matters eternally? Is it my perspective on a virus or is it how I love?
We can’t understand love apart from an existential, experiential, encounter of love. As Christians, we have this in the gospel, as we read above in First John and as we know existentially in our own relationships with God. Yet in the time of Coronavirus who will show it? It is a sad time, to be alone at home, seeing it all play out. No, not the virus, the Church’s response to it. And again, no, not because of a personal stance on the virus, nothing about the virus, just love in the time of it.
If you were hoping for a “Christian view” of Coronavirus, you won’t find it here. This is an article about the Christian view of love in the time of Coronavirus. And along these same lines, may I now ask a question I’ve wondered throughout this season of lockdown?
What really matters here? What matters beyond the temporal moment, what matters eternally? Is it my perspective on a virus or is it how I love? This is a crisis, much worse than Coronavirus or any other event of 2020, if we allow it to be.
If someone’s view doesn’t make sense to me, it is because I need to listen more closely.
I want to give some background. I am both a pastor’s wife as well as a therapist. I meet daily with people of various walks of life and backgrounds. Each has a different view of the times we live in, a different take on popular political controversies and issues, and a different view on Coronavirus. My job is not to convince them of anything, my job is to listen.
As a therapist I have been trained in the philosophy that if you were to live someone’s entire life exactly as they have inside their own body and mind, with all the same contexts, all the same events and people, everything that person believes would make perfect sense. I am not offended if my client says they do not believe in Coronavirus and I am not offended if they do. I am not offended if they believe in wearing a mask or if they do not believe in wearing a mask. Their view makes perfect sense. If it does not make sense to me, it is because I need to listen more closely.
Perhaps the reason we as Christians are having such an issue with showing love in this divided season of time is because we simply will not listen. People have told me what my view is on Coronavirus. Some of you reading this might also have a conclusion of my own views to project upon me from reading this article. What people tell me comes with many assumptions about my character and who I am as a person. Some of these assumptions have the potential to make me feel good, some of them not so much. To the careful reader I am sure the irony here is not lost. I never told my view in the first place.
Our love is our testimony of the gospel, of God who has named us Beloved.
Now let us now imagine this on a far larger scale. Is this how everyone is feeling, or at least a good majority of people? Judged. Foreign views cast upon them. Derogatory statements made in conjunction with the assumptions. The assertion that no Christian could believe such and such. And in the midst of all of this, did anyone ever take the time to simply listen?
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:11)
But wait, even in the time of Coronavirus?
Yes, even in the time of Coronavirus.
“No one has ever seen God,” John says, continuing on. And we have been alone in what feels for some of us like hundreds of years of solitude, we, Christians and non-Christians alike. We are alone, and no one has ever seen God. What can be done? John explains,
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. (1 John 4:12)
No one has ever seen God. Therefore, it’s up to us, how well we love each other, how well we love the world, Christ in us, the Spirit guiding us, to show him to others.
How well will we love those who are alone right now, waiting to be loved?
This is our proclamation and witness of love—that it is real, it is here to be believed in, and that it matters more than anything else in this disenchanted world. This is our testimony of the gospel, of a God who has named us Beloved, who has given us love as an identity, who desires to share through us his love to many more.
I am a firm believer that it is the small things in life that mean the most. The text back. The giving of the benefit of the doubt. Listening, in particular, is a major component of love at a practical level. For someone to feel loved, the person generally needs to feel seen and heard. People feel most seen and heard when they are listened to. When their feelings are validated they feel that they actually matter as human beings.
They are alone, the people with whom we are to share his love, and they are watching, listening to what we will tell them. What will we tell them? What will we show them?